6 Social Media Marketing Tips

Social media is where the marketing action is today. But Social Media Marketing is not the same as print or other types of marketing. To get the most out of these channels of communication, you need to understand the differences and adjust your approach accordingly.

We have no space here for a course in social media marketing. What we can do is give you six social media marketing tips you can use once you do understand the basics. Let's get right to it.

1. Have a Social Media Marketing Plan

When you are trying to market your product or service, it is tempting to "dive-in" to social media. It's so easy to start posting, tweeting, and generally burning hours on the Web. There are so many social media channels to choose from. So many different ways you can interact with your customers and potential customers.

You could be online 24 hours a day doing social media stuff. But this is not going to be the best use of your time. You need a Social Media Marketing Plan.

A social media marketing plan is a way to organize and coordinate everything you do on social media. It should contain at least the following:

• What you hope to achieve with social media. Are you trying to increase brand awareness? Get visitors to your website? Drive customers to a sales page? Protect your image from online attacks?
• An audit of your current social media situation. This is easy if you haven't done any social media marketing yet. If you have, you need to know what you have done so far and what results, if any, these efforts have achieved.
• How you plan to achieve your goals. Which social media channels will you use? How will you use them? Who in your organization will be responsible for doing the work?
• How you will actually do the work. Are you planning to do everything manually? Will you be investing in a tool or tools to help?

It will take some real thought and effort to come up with a plan. And you will have to update the plan over time. The social media landscape constantly changes. And your plan will need to change as you see the results of your initial efforts. Still, having a plan will save you lots of work and get you far better results than just diving in with no plan.

2. Focus on One Social Media Channel at a Time

At first, you will want to focus your social media marketing efforts on a single channel. That may sound crazy at first, with your potential audience scattered across many of them. But there are several good reasons for starting with just one.

• By doing so, you will be able to develop a deeper relationship with people in that channel.
• You will more quickly learn if this channel can be productive for your business.
• You only have so many hours in a day to spend on social media. Spreading yourself across many channels can prevent you from having any kind of impact in the time you have available.

Once you have experience with this first channel, you can try another. Or if this one is getting you the results you targeted, you can stick with it. You don't have to have a presence on many channels if one or two are enough for your needs.

But this begs the question of which social media channel to try first. That's the subject of the next topic.

3. Go Where Your Customers Go

Since you don't have infinite resources, you need to focus your social marketing efforts. That means you need to target your efforts at the social channels your audience uses. If you are a member of your own audience, this might be easy. Consider an electrical engineer targeting other electrical engineers. This person probably has a good idea where his audience hangs out online.

If you are not a member of your own audience, you need some way to find them. If a highly-specialized audience, there's likely a social channel that caters to them.

If not, here are some general tips that should help you track them down.

• Have your competitors been around for a while? Find out where they market on social media. They may already use the best social media channels for your target audience.
• If you are targeting businesspeople, LinkedIn is where they network.
• Consumers are more likely to be using Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.
• Both consumers and businesspeople use Twitter. But as of early 2016, this service is in a serious downturn. Membership is dropping rapidly amid allegations of censorship against political conservatives and conservative interests. If your product or service targets these areas you may be better off starting somewhere else.

As you can see, finding the best channels to communicate with potential customers can be hard. But  it is well worth the effort. It doesn't matter how good your marketing plan is if your potential customers never see it.

4. Try the Social Media 4-1-1 Plan

Several years ago someone (reportedly Andrew Davis, author of Brandscaping) invented the 4-1-1 Rule for Twitter. It says that only one of every six tweets you do should be self-promoting. One of the other 5 should be a retweet of a relevant tweet. And 4 should be shares of relevant content written by someone else. But why?

The idea here is that if all you publish is self-serving tweets, people will quickly tune you out. But deliver lots of relevant information, and people are more likely to follow you.

Also, sharing relevant content written by other people says something about you. It says that you are in tune with your market. This increases your status in the eyes of readers. It also increases the chances they will listen when you tell them about your product or service.

Many successful Twitter marketers follow the 4-1-1 plan or something close to it. And the value of this approach isn't limited to that service. Thousands of social media marketers do this in other channels. Even email marketers often use the basic 4-1-1 model.

This isn't the only way to approach your social media marketing. But the basic concept is sound and the plan is easy to follow. You could do worse than to follow this approach to start you campaigns.

5. Commit to Social Media Monitoring

Following a social media marketing plan is great. And focusing on the channels where your customers are will help. And delivering content using the 4-1-1 plan or something similar can make for happier customers.

But how do you know what is working? How do you know if you are getting an adequate return for all the work you are putting into your social media marketing? How would you know if someone was panning one of your products or trashing your brand online?

You won't know unless you commit to Social Media Monitoring.

According to Wikipedia, social media monitoring (a.k.a social media measurement) is, "an active monitoring of social media channels for information, usually tracking of various social media content such as blogs, wikis, news sites, micro-blogs such as Twitter, social networking sites, video/photo sharing websites, forums, message boards and user-generated content in general as a way to determine the volume and sentiment of online conversation about a brand or topic."

Distilling that to something more usable: Social Media Monitoring is tracking how much people are talking about a topic or brand, and whether or not they like it.

If you are monitoring social media you will know whether people like your new service. You will know if your brand recognition is growing. You will know if someone is bad-mouthing your product.

Social media monitoring doesn't need to be restricted to just monitoring your product or service. You can monitor what people are saying about your industry or that new market you are hoping to expand into. New trends often appear first in social media. If you know about them, you can adapt your marketing to benefit from the buzz. Social media monitoring can be a very powerful tool for growing your business.

The problem of course is that social media monitoring is hard work. Even skimming all the posts and blogs and tweets that flow through the big social media channels would require an entire team.

Or a tool.

6. Let a Tool Do the Hard Work for You

If you think about how much happens in social media every hour of every day, it is clear that manually monitoring social media won't work. There is just too much to read and keep track of. To do this right, you are going to need a tool.

I suggest you start your search for a tool with this one: the NetBase Live Pulse(TM) Suite. This suite was designed for executives, managers, and marketing teams. It gives you instant visibility into the social movement of your brands, campaigns, and competitors. Everything you need to know is displayed on colorful, informative dashboards.

The Suite is comprised of several parts:

• NetBase Live Pulse Social – Monitor brand performance, identify the most shared images, discover the most engaging posts, and identify the biggest influencers.
• NetBase Live Pulse Mashup – Puts all the metrics that matter on one screen. Not just social media but customer care, marketing, sales, finance, and more. Allows you to monitor your KPIs in real time and compare your performance against your competitors.
• NetBase Live Pulse Unleashed – Add Live Pulse screens to your websites to show your customers you listen. These screens can display customer posts and social metrics for all to see.

When you choose NetBase Live Pulse Suite, you have the ability to monitor all the major social media channels at once. Even better, this is a real-time tool. That is, you will see what's happening right when it happens, instead of later when it might be too late to respond. NetBase Live Pulse can display information on your tablet, laptop or even your smart phone. That means you can receive and react to the insights it provides wherever you are.

While there are other social media monitoring tools out there, we are confident that you will like the NetBase Live Pulse Suite. To learn more or request a demo, click here.